Developing a Home Yoga Practice

Developing a home practice is a key element in the advancement of any serious yoga practitioner. This is a time that you set aside for developing your relationship to all that is YOU: body, mind and spirit. It is a sacred period of renewal. When we commit to a home practice on a daily basis our lives begin to blossom in unimaginable ways. Get ready for the ride of your life!

When developing a home yoga practice I ask the following questions:

  • How much time do I have to practice? Many of us start out with great enthusiasm and often bite off more than we can chew when juggling busy lives. Make sure the time you choose is realistic and something you can sustain over time.
  • What time of day works best? Traditionally we practice yoga first thing in the morning, before the busyness of the day takes over and our energy is pulled ‘outward.' Destiny, we get up, we set our energy for the day and attract circumstances that reflect the energy we have taken time to cultivate

If the...

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Will You Be a Victim or a Creator?

I have just completed a personal week-long meditation retreat. I do this a couple of times a year. A whole week of kriya, breath and meditation. Not teaching, just exploring who I am, what brings me joy, what behaviors I am wanting to outgrow and who I am expanding into. I pour all of myself into these retreats and recharge from the inside out.

This was particularly poignant given that these times can feel so stressful and isolating.

My inner focus was how to stop energy from being hijacked by fear and polarization and instead invest it in the solution: to walk through life with my eyes and heart open! Cultivating the capacity to see clearly and respond to life with connection and love.

I learned long ago that when you take time for inner practice, insight and joy arise, the source of who you are gets time to express itself, unencumbered by personality, by the pain you have experienced, or the masks you wear.

Essential ingredients are: a practice of self reflection and self...

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Creating a Positive Relationship with Our Inner Self

Creating a positive relationship with our inner self is a lifelong adventure. Learning how to meditate has been the key to my own personal success and expansion. I recently wrote this piece on my personal inner process so I share it in the hope that it can inspire others to keep up the investigation into what it means to be human, why we make the decisions we make, how to become a more loving and connected person…

In the last year, I have deepened my practice, spending a couple of hours in meditation most mornings, and digging into who I am, what makes me tick, observing all the subtle way I am mis-identifying myself with thoughts, watching the contracting energy of stress and how it works on my body and thoughts. Seeing more clearly the subtle ways I check out of presence and invest my precious life-force in the vast collective unconscious.

Then there is the experience of feeling blooms of pure bliss when I access deeper levels of mind, allowing myself to linger in a place...

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High Frequency Living

I have been having conversations with many friends lately. We have been sharing our reflections of these current times, the pain of seeing the division between many of us human beings getting wider, the challenges associated with the ongoing pandemic, the continued relevance of the Black Lives Matter movement and our hopes for the future.

I recognize that there is a conflict between people, many of whom actually share the same values and care for the world and each other. The polarization of ideas and beliefs strengthens our idea of separation, this is turn brings isolation, anger, fear, etc.

I know in my heart that the solution lies in all of us learning to transmute/transcend our own pain and suffering and supporting those around us to do the same. It lies in practices that can lift our frequency and establish a heart connection, so that the confusion and unconsciousness that drive the momentum of our lives can be paused long enough for us to remember who we are, and what really...

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Rituals to Begin & End Your Day

There is so much to be said for how we wake up and how we go to sleep. This precious time can be the most powerful of the entire day. Upon awakening, there is a newness, a sense of opportunity, of new beginnings that we can access so long as we do not rush to pick up the stress or agitation we were running with the day before. At the end of the day, if we take time to clear our mind and emotions we will get to sleep more easily and rise with a clearer mind.

Waking Up Consciously

One of my teachers told me something that stays with me to this day. He said, “as soon as you wake up, get up.” The sleep we get after we hit the snooze button can often make us more foggy and tired. If we get up right away, we can use the time to connect inwardly, before the duties of the day pull us into action.

When you first wake up, you are relaxed, your brain has been operating at the theta and delta brainwave states during sleep, which linger as you wake up. If you pay attention at this...

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Remaining Centered in a Turbulent World

At any given moment we are influenced by so many things. Our senses are reporting in about our environment. Our mind is busy with some agenda whether conscious or unconscious. Our experience is being colored by whatever dominant emotions we feel, and somewhere in the midst of all this is our center, the still point around which everything else is turning.

PHYSICAL CENTER – In the Yoga Tradition, when you are standing upright, your physical center is considered the navel, typically described as around 1-2 inches below the belly button. This is your gravitational center. Gravity pulls mass downwards. When we are balanced and connected to our navel point it allows us to ground through the legs (with gravity) and lift through the spine and torso (resist gravity). When we are aware of and connected to our center of gravity, there is a natural balancing of the body, which in turn brings a feeling of ease, stability, and connection.

MENTAL CENTER – The mind...

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Embracing Growth

The web of love and light that connects us is enlivened as we feed it with energy. To do this we have to overcome our habitual state, dominated by often negative and worrisome thoughts and emotions. This habitual way of being is like the warm familiar cloak that veils possibility and keeps us in the ever repeating known. While the routine knowns of life can feel comfortable for a time, after a while we begin to stagnate and lose our zest for adventure, and to fear what we do not know.

The way to step out of this ever repeating past, to begin to evolve and awaken new potentials is twofold:

  • Embrace a willingness to change, and techniques that allows you to penetrate through your veiled perception to the inner expansive field of light. You can then learn to attune to a higher frequency, stabilize it in your consciousness and return to three-dimensional reality with the capacity to operate from a clearer and more connected place.
  • Surround yourself with conscious community....
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Evolution Through Yoga Practice

What are we seeking from our practice? Is it peace, connection, grounding, a feeling of belonging, a way out of pain and suffering, an orientation toward the sacred, a methodology to pierce through the veils of misperception? There are so many approaches. All are valid, and in my experience, what we seek can change over time.

What keeps us coming back is our direct experience of, or glimpses of that which we are seeking. We take one committed, wholehearted step toward our goal and that which we are seeking comes toward us. My teacher said to me “the Divine connection you seek and meditate upon is always meditating upon you.” To experience that I had to change my orientation to what I was doing. I needed to recognize that the deeper teaching for me was to slightly shift the way I was interacting with my inner being. If the Divine is within me, then how to truly orient toward it? This set me on an accelerated path of discovery because any preconceived notion of what I...

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Finding Relief from Pain and Fear

Pain and fear can be great motivators. Think about the last time you had physical pain, enough that you had to stop your regular routine and tend to it. When we are in the grips of real physical pain the ONLY course of action we can take, is to make it stop by whatever means possible. To find the cause and treat it. Physical pain is by its nature all-consuming and requires a focused approach.

Emotional pain is a little more tricky. It is powerful enough to color our experience, including how we perceive ourselves and others, and how we are responding to people and situations. Untended emotional pain festers and creates emotional infection, the kind that eats at us from the inside out.

Picture yourself having a tiff with a loved one in the morning. It is left unresolved. You marinade in it all day, perhaps for a month. The situation gets a bigger and bigger charge. To distract yourself from your own self-inflicted misery you go out drinking with friends, or you shut down emotionally,...

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Releasing Anger

Anger expressed in a non harmful way can be cathartic or positively fuel forward momentum.

Anger expressed harmfully leads to guilt and shame which perpetuates the causes of anger.

Anger unexpressed is the slow poison that eats one from the inside.

If we dig deeply enough there is anger and resentment at the core of many of our struggles.

One of the deeper sources of anger or rage is when our boundaries have been transgressed. We hold resentment toward the perpetrator for overstepping, and toward ourselves for not holding the boundary. We build stories around our anger to justify it. We vilify those who are perceived as antagonists.

As long as we point the finger outward we are missing the greater opportunity of self healing.

It’s tough when you are dealing with anger as you have to be willing to feel it, to for example dump all the yucky judgements and rage filled thoughts onto a paper, and keep going until you get to the core wound.

Now you work on self forgiveness and over...

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